Great Thundering Bombast...!

There he is, Barack Obama's worst nightmare, catapulting himself front and centre again in the news. His gesticulating emphasis, gloating, challenging, malleable-faced assertions have captivated the media and the public. This man was born to the black pulpit - and obviously finds a comfortable place to exhibit himself and his scornful dismissal of the white society he lives within, but not part of - on any available stage.

Senator Obama, in attempting to excuse the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's excesses, baleful and fanciful, hateful and accusing, describes him as being of the "old school" of black preachers, and he's right. It's certainly not quite in line with the kind of humanistic, deserving and peaceful remonstrances for justice that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. expounded, to the credit of the black community.

That community that reverences the Reverend King, as opposed to that same community that succumbs to the thundering bombast of a self-reverencing preacher like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. A colleague and spiritual brother-in-arms of such as Nation of Islam's Minister Louis Farrakhan. He can find no fault with Minister Farrakhan's description of Judaism, for example, as a "gutter religion".

Yet denounces the white public at large and the press for not understanding the Black Church, for not endlessly commiserating with the past plight of blacks in America. Rather than focusing on what can bring blacks and whites together, he exercises his considered judgement in shoving them further apart by unrestrained condemnation of history and his steadfast refusal to live in the present.

Reverend Wright condemns accusations of an-American conduct leveled at him by resorting to the last refuge of a scoundrel, as a self-referential righteous minister of the black church. "It is an attack on the black church by people who know nothing about the African-American experience." Which hasn't stopped him and those of his ilk from attacking white Americans or Jews, for blacks haven't lived their experience either.

Instead of embracing the opportunity exposed by the goodwill of white American youth and hopeful Americans of every political stripe to hand the U.S. presidency for the first time to a person of colour, Reverend Wright is splenetically venting spite and intolerance, throwing a bruising shadow of suspicion over the very candidate whose run for the highest office of the land could reflect a healing of a national wound.

His self-aggrandizement in revelling in his home-bred notoriety bespeaks his lack of commitment to a national society of consensus and equality of the colours in the United States. His venomous identification of U.S. and Israeli "terrorism", his unequivocal statements that the disaster of 9-11 is explicable in light of American foreign policy, and his claims that the epidemic of AIDS represents a deliberate plot to eradicate blacks condemn him.

His random attacks on those to whom he ascribes evil intent toward blacks, his scurrilous characterizations of whites and of Jews, his pride in his outspoken opinions offered for public consumption may gain him adherents in some parts of the black community, but it's fair to say that among a goodly portion of that same community his theatrics recognized as demeaning to black aspirations, and are anything but popular.

They have no useful purpose. They serve only to drive a wedge further between the communities. He is wilfully sowing a new round of suspicion and isolation, re-polarizing the entities that had seen fit to come together in a common purpose; a union of solidarity for the public good. The man is offensively ignorant, and ignorantly effusive in his self-delusionary rants.

Little wonder that the Democratic front-runner has been forced to declare himself "outraged and appalled", for the Reverend Wright's version of America. The Reverend Wright's vision of the ongoing separation of black and white, does not reflect Senator Obama's promise to himself and to America. Barack Obama has been forced to stand by in agony, witnessing a collapse of his own singular purpose.

Overtaken by the passionate rhetoric of another type of racist, with his clanging theories about a deathly disease-conspiracy against American blacks, and America the terror-state. But the Reverend Wright does have some compelling support, for none other than Seyyed Mohsen Yahyavi, Secretary-General of Iran's Inter-Parliamentary Group, singles out the United States as the biggest threat to world peace.

And, oddly enough, represents a country whose stated purpose is the defeat of America, once it has succeeded in eradicating the Jewish state.